Configuring Milestone XProtect With WSC

Before configuring XProtect for use with Wasabi Surveillance Cloud (WSC), be sure that you have reviewed the recording server storage requirements. For more detail, refer to Milestone XProtect Prerequisites. Once complete, enable disaster recovery and storage extension (extension), as described below.

Enabling Disaster Recovery

1. In the Milestone XProtect Management Client under Wasabi Surveillance Cloud, click Disaster Recovery.

   

2. Click Enable.

   

3. In the Wasabi Surveillance Cloud Target window, enter your bucket credentials:

   Server URL — Use the appropriate server URL as defined in Service URLs for Wasabi's Storage Regions.

   Access Key & Secret Key — By default, a WSC user-specific access and secret key will be auto-populated into the Access and Secret Key fields. To use the Root Account key, you must log in to your Wasabi Console account to retrieve those keys.

   

4. Optionally, to connect a bucket manually, click the checkbox to Enter existing bucket name manually.

5. In the Bucket name field, enter a pre-existing bucket name.

   

6. Optionally, to display your existing bucket options, click List buckets.

   

7. Select a bucket from the list.

   

8. Click OK.

9. A message will confirm that Disaster Recovery was successfully enabled and that, by default, the Local default recording storage is paused. Your data will not begin replicating until the system is set to a running state. To close the prompt, click OK.

   

10. Click the Paused slider to set the feature to a running state.

    

11. A message will request that you confirm the changes. Click Yes.

    

    WSC will begin to scan and mirror every object in the "MediaDatabase" recording server location and replicate an identical copy of the on-premises video data to your Wasabi bucket. This may take several minutes, depending on how many cameras and files are being managed.

    

    Once the system has scanned the entire folder and replicated all data, the completion bar will remain in the 99% range, as shown below.

    

12. To verify that the data is being replicated, open the Windows File Explorer and navigate to your recording server path. You will notice green Wasabi Cloud icons on each of the files. This indicates that those files are protected and replicated to your Wasabi bucket.

    

Verifying That Your Internet is Running Accordingly

1. Open Task Manager on the Recording Server to see how fast WSC can upload to the cloud.

2. Select the Performance tab.

3. Select Ethernet. Unless other processes are running in the background, Receive will show the incoming camera data while the Send shows the rate at which WSC is uploading to the cloud. On average, Send should be no less than Receive.

Below, the example on the left shows a problematic situation where Send bandwidth is less than Receive. This means that WSC is not able to keep up with the incoming data flow. In the example on the right, WSC is not keeping up. In this case, 25% headroom would be desirable (showing about 12%). The percentage of uploaded camera data should continue to increase and eventually stabilize around 99%.

Enabling Extension

Before enabling Extension (storage extension), it is best practice to first enable disaster recovery (DR).

1. Under Wasabi Surveillance Cloud in the site navigation, click Extension.

2. Click Enable.

   If Disaster Recovery is already enabled, the bucket field credentials will be pre-populated.

   

   The Cloud Tier Configuration prompt will appear. Select one of the following parameter options:

   • By Age moves recordings not accessed for more than a specified time period.

   • By Size moves recordings when space on the local storage exceeds a specified value.

3. To tier By Age, click the drop-down list. Select a number and a unit of time.

4. Click OK.

   

5. Optionally, to tier By Size, enter a number in the percentage field.

6. Click OK.

   

7. A message will confirm that the Cloud Tier (Storage Extension) was successfully enabled and that the recording storage will be set to Paused mode. Click OK.

   

8. Click the Paused slider to set the feature to a Running state.

   

9. A message will request that you confirm that changes. Click Yes.

   

   The data will automatically begin to tier to Wasabi when it meets the configured Age or Size.

   

Verifying That Files are Tiering to Wasabi

After you have configured Extension, you can verify that the files are successfully tiering to Wasabi by following the steps below.

1. Open a Windows File Explorer window.

2. Navigate to you recording server path.

3. When Extension is enabled, you will notice the to the left of each file. This indicates that the files are now 0 byte stub files and the data has been moved to Wasabi.

   

4. Right-click on a file.

5. Select Properties.

   Notice the difference in both Size and Size on Disk, as shown below.